e.

"Did Doctor Mayberry know you were coming?" asked the singer lady,
hurrying on the climax of the recital.

"Not a word! He'd gone off the week before taking it sensible, but I
could see hurt mightily about it. I got to the University Hall late,
and 'most everybody in the world looked like they was there. I stood at
the back and didn't hope to see or hear, just thankful to be near him,
but I seen one of them young usher men a-looking hard at me and he came
up and asked me if I wasn't Mr. Thomas Mayberry's mother. He had knew
me by the favor. I told him yes and he took me up to the very front
just as the singing begun. I soon got me and the silk dress settled,
with the bokay all Providence had sent Tom on my knee, and looked
around me. There next to me was the sweetest young-lady girl I have
'most ever saw, and she smiled at me real friendly. I was just about to
speak when the music stopped and the addressing began by a tall thin
kinder man. Elinory, child, did you ever hear one of them young men's
life-commencement speeches made?" This time Mother Mayberry peered over
the top of her glasses seriously and her needle paused suspended over
the fast narrowing hole in the sock.

"Yes, but I don't think I ever listened very carefully," admitted Miss
Wingate with a smile.

"Well, I felt that if the Lord had gave it to me to stand up there and
say a word of start-off to all them boys setting solemn and listening,
it wouldn't have been about no combination of things done by men dead
and gone, that didn't seem to prove nothing in particular on nobody. I
woulder read 'em a line of scripture and then talked honest dealing by
one another, the measuring out of work according to the pay and always
a little over, the putting of a shoulder under another man's pressing
burden, the respect of women folks, the respect of theyselves and the
looking to the Lord to see 'em through it all. That speech made me so
mad I 'most forgot it was time for Tom's valediction. Honey-bird, I
wisht you coulder seen him and heard him."

"I wish I could," answered Miss Wingate with a flush.

"Dearie me, but he was handsome and he spoke words of sense that the
other gray-haired man seemed to have forgot! And they was a farewell
sadness in it too, what got some of them boys' faces to working, and I
felt a big tear roll down and splash right on the lace collar. Then he
sat down and they was a to-do of hollering and clapping, but I just sat
there too ha